Friday, 7 P.M. to midnight: Creating songs and script. In a movie musical you create the soundtrack first, while in a nonmusical film the soundtrack comes last. I sketched out several songs with Band-in-a-Box ($88, www.pgmusic.com), which creates a fully orchestrated arrangement from chords that you enter. My first few efforts fell flat, but after a few hours two tunes worked well, so I used the program's Render to WAV to convert the tracks directly to WAV files. I opened these in Sound Forge ($400, www.mediasoftware.sonypictures.com) and cut and pasted parts to give the songs the shape I wanted. I also did some pitch shifting, adding key changes to make the songs feel more dramatic. I then burned each song to a separate CD in order to record the vocals.

Saturday, midnight to 2 A.M.: Recording vocals. I don't have my own home recording studio; in fact, I live in a tiny one-room apartment in Manhattan, so I had to devise an acoustically isolated spot in the apartment for recording the vocal track. I picked a hallway near the bathroom and a closet. With the bathroom door closed and the closet door open to expose the clothing and linens inside, I created a small echo-free zone for recording vocals in the wee hours without bothering the neighbors. I used the built-in microphone on my camcorder, a Panasonic AG-EZ50U (discontinued, bought for $1,399 from www.jandr.com) as my vocal mic. I plugged a set of earbuds into the camcorder and another set into a CD player, on which I played the instrumental track I had burned. With a bud from the camcorder in one ear and a bud from the CD player in the other, I held the camera in one hand, rolled tape, and recorded the songs. Then I connected the camera to my computer, opened my video editor, Vegas ($559, www.mediasoftware.sonypictures.com), and captured the recording I'd just made. I deleted the video track, leaving only the unaccompanied vocal track. Then I added the instrumental tracks I had created earlier and mixed the two tracks together. Now I had a full vocal soundtrack, which I burned to make a new soundtrack CD.

Saturday, 2 to 7 A.M.: Sleeping.

Saturday, 7 A.M. to 6 P.M.: Shooting main video sequences. Only 36 hours remaining and I still hadn't created any video. I had to shoot full takes of each song in a variety of settings. Each time I found a location with light that was bright enough but not too direct, I'd set up the camera on a tripod, frame a shot, play the soundtrack from my CD player, and lip-sync while the tape rolled. I normally kept the CD player on Repeat mode, and repeated each take several times without stopping. With so little time available, I didn't memorize lyrics; I taped a large-type copy of them to the tripod right near the lens so I could read it.

Saturday, 6 to 8 P.M.: Logging footage. Before capturing footage to my laptop, I logged everything I had shot, writing down time codes and descriptions of each scene, along with notes about which scenes were usable and which had technical problems or were otherwise messed up.

Saturday, 8 to 11 P.M.: Editing main sequences. Once I'd logged all my footage on paper, I connected my camera to the computer, fired up Vegas, marked the scenes I'd selected for batch capture, and pulled them into the computer. Now I could pick which takes of each song worked best visually and marry them to the soundtrack I'd created earlier. To create credible lip sync, I opened the WAV file in the Vegas trimmer, located a syllable that's easy to lip-read on the screen (the T sound in the word "Take") and placed a marker on it. Then I marked that same spot in the video track and dragged the two tracks so that the markers matched. Now the video and audio tracks looked perfectly synchronized, although they were created at different times.